EVERYTHING YOU WANTED, AND
SAMOA

Pastry Chef Jeff Bonilla takes on the Kitchen masters Challenge on Friday at the L’Auberge Del Mar in Del Mar, California. The theme was Girl Scout Cookies. Bonilla took the ingredients of a Samoa cookie and made his own dessert.

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Pastry Chef Jeff Bonilla takes on the Kitchen masters Challenge on Friday at the L’Auberge Del Mar in Del Mar, California. The theme was Girl Scout Cookies. Bonilla took the ingredients of a Samoa cookie and made his own dessert.

Mythic names from the “time-tested pantheon of color-coded cookies,” as a writer once described Girl Scout Cookies.

With the youth organization’s 100th anniversary in March — its cookie fundraiser will engulf San Diego offices and grocery-store entrances through Sunday, when booth sales end — it’s the right time to issue a Kitchen Masters Challenge, Girl Scout-style.

So I called up Jeff Bonilla, a high-end pastry chef/chocolatier known for confidently experimenting with desserts.

You’ll find Bonilla at a chic bastion of seaside resort life. That’s him in the belly of L’Auberge Del Mar’s old banquet kitchen, where he tackles made-from-scratch rosemary gelato.

THE CHALLENGE: “Take a crack at your version of either the Thin Mints or the Samoas, the two best-selling Girl Scout Cookies, respectively.”

hIS RESPONSE: “My wife was a Girl Scout,” said Bonilla, 30, whose offbeat humor is hidden by a starchy chef coat and subtle manner. When he accepted the task, L’Auberge’s pastry chef knew he’d have the customary week to come up with a Kitchen Masters solution. He didn’t know that, with the help of our local Girl Scout council, I recruited a 9-year-old to judge his dessert.

The execution: Bonilla went with the Samoas.

“I was having a hard time figuring out exactly what kind of cookie this is. I’m assuming it’s a sugar cookie, with caramel, toasted coconut and chocolate,” Bonilla said on the day of his big reveal. The Little Brownie Bakers company that makes the Samoas said it’s a “vanilla-based cake” with the toppings described above.

“What I’m going to do is my version,” Bonilla said.

Trained in French pastry techniques at the San Diego Culinary Institute, Bonilla made a ganache (a melted mixture of heavy cream, semisweet chocolate, butter, vanilla paste) and spread it over an elegant plank of slate, which acted as a plate. Placed on the slate next, something from the world of French desserts: a bar of chocolate cremeux (heavy cream, sugar, egg yolks and chocolate chips melted, whisked, then chilled into a mousse).

Dollops of caramel sauce acted as a kind of sweet, amber glue for toasted coconut flakes and crumbled sugar cookies made in-house and dehydrated. Bonilla added ganache droplets and broken slivers of semisweet chocolate. And, incorporating his interest in modernist cuisine (some people call it “molecular gastronomy”), Bonilla blended lecithin powder and caramel into an airy froth — it joined a scoop of house-made caramel gelato and sprigs of stevia leaves on the slate.

This was Samoa-inspired art.

“It’s not a cookie,” Bonilla admitted, adding his goal was to tell a story with his plates.

OK, but wasn’t he worried it was too chichi for the kid judging his dessert?

“Not at all,” said Bonilla. “I’m just a big kid that plays with food.”

The dessert judge: Hailee Wong’s green sash displayed her first-ever Girl Scout badge — in sewing. The 9-year-old patiently sat at L’Auberge one Friday afternoon with her mom, Adrienne Wong, and Jo Dee C. Jacob, chief executive officer of Girl Scouts San Diego. While Hailee just joined Troop 3759 in January, she had been easily recruited to assess Bonilla’s take on Samoas.

“I get to leave school early to eat dessert?” was her elated reaction to the invite.

The verdict: “I’m sure he ate a million of those cookies to get it like this,” Hailee said when the slate was placed before her in the lobby outside Kitchen 1540. “It’s so pretty.”

The diminutive dessert judge set about picking out the Samoa components expertly. “I found the coconut. The caramel. The chocolate. It’s beautiful. I’m scared to ruin it.”

“I enjoy that you’re gonna get the chance to eat it up,” Bonilla encouraged her gamely. After a few seconds admiring the presentation, the Girl Scout set to work with her spoon.